


Something New

by Unsentimentalf



Category: Sapphire and Steel
Genre: Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-08
Updated: 2018-08-08
Packaged: 2019-06-23 20:53:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15614787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unsentimentalf/pseuds/Unsentimentalf
Summary: The same place, a very long time after.





	Something New

One table remains with its chequered tablecloth and the piece of wall that it has been pushed up against and the two plastic chairs on either side and the patterned tiles that these objects stand on and the patch of ceiling directly above their heads.

Sapphire sits on her chair now, elbows on the table, and watches Steel either working or possibly throwing a tantrum. She has never asked him which, though she might guess from the fact that he has never told her what practical aim this ripping apart and reconstitution of the small amount of matter they have been allowed might achieve. They are by their intrinsic essence defiers of entropy, but she wonders if given long enough that force will nevertheless win, if one day there will be nothing more for Steel to break down and nothing to be made up again from the remains. She has not asked Steel for his opinion. She does not want to know what he thinks about the future.

There are things she has never told him either. She has never told him how much she envies his ferocious, pointless activity. Her own powers are long obsolete here. What good is it to be able to paddle a few feet back and forth in Time when they are adrift in a boundless ocean? And she knew the entire history of every object in this room long before Steel annihilated most of it. The only thing left to read is the last parts of Steel's personal history and when she does that there will be nothing left to find out ever again and that will be utterly unbearable. 

She has long since stopped speaking to him in her mind, terrified that one day he might slip and hasten the end by showing her more than he intended or that she wants to know. Talking aloud is safer. They don't speak much, anyway. She has always disliked repeating herself.

He strides the short distance from the chaos to his chair. “Personal elapsed time?”

Sapphire knows without wanting to that it is the 7,512th time he has asked her this. She also knows that no matter how she responds he will reiterate the question until she tells him what he wants to know. Steel is considerably less concerned with repeating himself than she is. Any minor amusement she can gain from that kind of conversation has long since dissipated. She tells him.

“Two hundred and forty eight years, three months, two days and seventeen hours.”

“Is that all? It feels a lot longer.”

Sapphire forebears to point out that he's said that nearly a thousand times before. Sometimes she does point it out. It makes no difference. 

They have been caught in loops together before, forced to repeat the same conversations over and over by the autocracy of Time. This is different. Personal elapsed time still flows in here. They still have their freedom to act as they will within this tiny box; they have merely run out of anything new to do or say or think or feel.

Two years ago they had a conversation in which she found out one small thing about her companion that she hadn't known before. Sapphire has drawn that one tiny change in her situation out for as long as she possibly can, turning it over in her mind in every possible way, but it is now utterly exhausted. She has not had a new train of thought for months now. She knows that she is very close to losing her grip on sanity, she who should never have been anything but absolutely stable. 

Sapphire looks across at the utterly familiar figure on the other side of the table and she smiles just a little.

“Tell me something new,” she says.

He frowns at her. “Now? Are you sure?” 

They have discussed how this works, of course. Discussed it and discussed it, until Steel understands what she needs in order to stay herself and how much she fears to exhaust all possibilities of change as well as anyone who is not Sapphire herself could. 

“I'm sure.” This is as long as she can hold out against the sameness.

Steel stares at his hands, folded on the table in front of him. He's thinking. He's careful about this. Good. She wants him to be careful. She bitterly regrets those early, reckless conversations before she'd realised that ignorance was all the currency that mattered here, when they'd told each other as much in an hour as might keep her going for half a century now. 

She can wait patiently for weeks or months now that she knows something will happen but he lifts his head much sooner than she was expecting. There is a glint in his eyes that she hadn't seen there for many years.

“I suppose you'll need to know sooner or later, and what's the difference in this place? I think- no, I'm sure that I have found a way to destroy myself.”

“Steel!” She's out of her seat without conscious intent, staring down at his brown hair. He looks up, a little reluctantly, to meet her eyes.

They discussed the possibility of self destruction endlessly two centuries ago. It was not possible then. Nothing can have changed. Nothing like that changes here.

“It is, regrettably, nothing that I can share,” he tells her. “I can't take you with me.”

“Could I learn?” 

She knows there is little hope of that. They tried, long ago, to teach each other how to use their powers with absolutely no success. It was like trying to teach an ape to wag its tail; nothing was there to be acted upon. Still, she has to ask.

He shakes his head.

“Let me think,” she says. “You can give me time to think, I suppose?”

“Don't take too long,” he says. 

Some things she knows are as certain as her own existence. With or without Steel she will eventually go insane. Madness will bring not oblivion but a tearing away of her remaining defences so that every remaining second will be raw and agonising. She had known that for a long time. All she can do is not think about it, as humans manage not to think about their inevitable deaths. 

Losing Steel will cost her hundreds of years of clinging on by her fingernails over a chasm that was always going to outwait her anyway.

"Is there no hope at all?" she asks eventually. 

"No other hope," Steel says. 

She can hear the slight sound of his foot tapping under the table. Now that he had told her he wants it over. Of course he does. Sapphire wonders whether in his place she would be kind enough to stay. 

"How long will you give me," she asks. 

He shrugs. "Five minutes, six months, ten years. What will it matter in the end?" 

"It matters to me now," she says sharply. "I need to know. Pick one, Steel."

"I won't do much more of this. Not even for you, Sapphire. A year," he says reluctantly. "I can give you a year."

She looks down at her fingers clasped around each other. A year. Thirty one million, five hundred and fifty seven thousand and six hundred seconds. In the back of her mind the countdown has started already. 

A slightly hysterical laugh escapes from her and Steel's brow wrinkles. 

"Sorry," she says, without enlightening him as to the cause. One year. It has just occurred to her that after all this time she has finally been granted an objective, unarguable measure of how much, or how little, her partner really cares.


End file.
